Edition:

Englishman abroad

With its wit, precision and sheer outrageousness, Noël Coward's Hay Fever is often seen as a quintessentially English comedy. But, as Simon Callow reveals, the writer's first masterpiece was actually drawn from his wild American days

Staying still only by force of will ... Noel Coward at 26. Photograph: Corbis

One of the first things Laurence Olivier did when he was appointed to create the National Theatre was invite Noël Coward to direct Hay Fever, giving him a cast that, as Coward remarked at the time, could have played the Albanian telephone directory: the brilliant young actors Maggie Smith, Lynn Redgrave and Derek Jacobi and, in her last major role, Edith Evans, widely regarded as the greatest living British actress.

Olivier's invitation surprised everyone, not least the author. Of Olivier's affection for Coward there was no doubt: Coward had cast him as Victor Prynne in the first production of Private Lives in 1930, giving him his first commercial success and ruthlessly inculcating in him the strict self-discipline required for light comedy. They became close friends, Coward introducing the younger man to the delights of world literature, although he never ceased to rag him about his ignorance in this department. They received their honorary doctorates from Oxford University on the same day, and Coward whispered into Olivier's ear as his citation for Doctor of Letters was read out: "Doctor of four letters, I presume." Olivier's decision to include Hay Fever in the repertory of his hard-won new theatre in 1966 was not only a charmingly affectionate gesture; it gave notice of his intention to maintain high levels of glamour at the Old Vic. It also tacitly acknowledged that Hay Fever, and Coward, had become classics.

The move consolidated what Coward drily referred to as "Dad's Renaissance", which had begun only a year before with James Roose-Evans's revival of Private Lives at the Hampstead Theatre Club, triumphantly transferred to the West End. The rediscovery of these 1920s masterpieces began the reassessment of a writer who, after a series of flops in the 1940s and 1950s, had become more famous as a personality, and as a nonpareil performer of his own songs in cabaret. A suntanned lizard of a man, cigarette permanently in hand, he seemed almost immobile apart from the quick precise movement of his thin lips and the flash of brilliant teeth; his distinctive, much-imitated, clipped tones and his sharply witty one-liners were legendary, but he seemed an incongruous figure in the Britain of the early 1960s.

Emerging occasionally from his Swiss retreat, Coward would denounce life in modern Britain in general, and the younger generation of playwrights in particular. The contempt was one-sided: both John Osborne and Harold Pinter hailed him as a great predecessor, as well they might. Forty years earlier, in 1924, the same mandarin figure now dismissing them had, as the daring young author of The Vortex, ringingly defended himself against the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier's dismissal of what he called "dustbin drama". "Sir Gerald ... having enthusiastically showered the English stage with second-rate drama for many years, now rises up with incredible violence and has a nice slap all round at the earnest and perspiring dramatists".

Hay Fever, far from earnest and breaking no sweat, was produced the following year, in 1925, an extraordinary year for Coward. He seemed, as actor, author, director, composer, lyricist, sketch-writer, to be laying siege to the West End. He was still giving his acclaimed neurotic tour de force performance in The Vortex, which had memorably articulated the disgust and confusion of his generation; his racy comedy Fallen Angels, irresistibly denounced by the London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality as "a revolting sex-play", was a huge succès de scandale; On With the Dance, his second revue - a follow-up to the gratifying but small-scale triumph of London Calling two years earlier - opened at the massive London Pavilion to barely modified rapture. Coward had conceived the show and wrote most of the material, both musical and dramatic; among the numbers was Poor Little Rich Girl, his first great hit as a song-writer, another trenchant comment on the dangerous vacuity of modern life.

In the wake of all these triumphs, the much-loved grande dame Marie Tempest, who had at first turned down Hay Fever, which Coward had written for her on spec the year before, was suddenly very interested, and invited him to direct her in it ("Come up here Noël and play this scene for me. You wrote it and you know it. I didn't write it and don't!"). The reviews, in Coward's own summary, described the play as "dull, amusing, thin, slight, tedious, witty and brittle"; it ran to excellent houses for a year. Shortly after the opening, in a mood of complex jubilation, Coward was arrested for knocking flower pots about in the streets of the West End, which earned him a night in jail.

This annus mirabilis was the culmination of everything Coward had worked for since his first appearance, at the age of 11, as Prince Mussel in The Goldfish. His extraordinary electric, almost anarchic, energy was tempered, even at that age, by keen application and a determination to learn; always, not far from the forefront of his brain, was the urgent voice of his ambition, fed by his determination to liberate his beloved mother from the drudgery of her life as a landlady. He was taken on by the greatest comic actor of the day, Charles Hawtrey (despite the actor telling his stage manager after Coward's audition, "Tarver, never let me see that boy again"), and the 12-year-old Coward followed him everywhere, learning, he later said, everything he ever knew about comedy. His career as a child actor was somewhat unreliable, however, and he determined to write, at first in conjunction with his childhood pal, another child actor, Esmé Wynne-Tyson.

At the same time, his sexual and social lives were developing precociously - hand in hand, so to speak. At the age of 14, he had been taken up by the 35-year-old painter Philip Streatfeild (for whom his mother occasionally charred) and quickly became part of Streatfeild's circle of admiring older men, which included the novelist Hugh Walpole; he would join them on their holidays, posing on the rocks for them.

It was Streatfeild who introduced him to the eccentric bohemian hostess Mrs Astley-Cooper ("Her principal pleasure," wrote Coward, "was to lie flat on her back on a mattress in front of the fire and shoot off witticisms in a sort of petulant wail"). When, in 1915, Streatfeild was dying of tuberculosis, his final injunction to her was to "take Noël Coward home with you, he is delicate and wants taking care of". (Coward, too, had suffered from tuberculosis at various periods in his youth.) Coward was thus initiated into country house living; fellow guests included Proust's translator, Scott Moncrieff, and the socially brilliant orchestral conductor, Malcolm Sargent. There he discovered the short stories of HH Munro (Saki), an acknowledged deep influence on his work, and diligently transcribed the conversations he heard. Some of all this found its way into Hay Fever; when Mrs Astley-Cooper later went to see his plays she said: "It amused me to hear my remarks put into the mouths of actors."

She took him to Alassio, Italy, for a house party, where his experience of the mores of the upper echelons of bohemianism expanded even further. He and his new chum Gladys Calthrop, who would later design all his plays, wrecked the English Club there by smearing black paint all over the walls. At this early age, he was evidently gripped with a strong compulsion to punish the establishment whose lifestyle he was so eagerly embracing.

A perhaps more significant influence on Hay Fever, however, was Coward's first visit to New York in 1921. By this time he was already a produced author: his play I'll Leave It to You, on a subject suggested by the American producer Gilbert Miller, had been seen in Manchester the previous year with some success. Miller had given him a series of informal tutorials on playwriting including the useful information that the construction of a play was as important as the foundations of a house and that dialogue, however good, was only interior decoration. "I instantly recognised this as authentic wisdom."

Coward sent one of his next plays, The Young Idea, to George Bernard Shaw, who told him that he "showed every indication of becoming a good playwright providing that I never again in my life read another word that he, Shaw, had written". It is a remarkable play, alternately vivacious and painful, expressing all the young Coward's restless, almost violent impulsiveness: "He only stays still by force of will," his friend Ethel Mannin wrote of him at this period, "and if he lets himself go he would be doing a step-dance all over the room the whole time, chanting amusing couplets, rhyming flagellation with adulation, and things like that."

He met his match in energy in Manhattan in 1921. Straight off the Aquitania, he went to his first Broadway show, Nice People, starring Francine Larrimore and Katharine Cornell, with Tallulah Bankhead in support. "What interested me most was the tempo." It took him, he said, a good 10 minutes of the first act to understand what anyone was saying. "I found out what 'pep' meant and have tried to instil it into my London companions." He did the town: the subways and the Woolworth Building and Harlem and Broadway, as well as loucher environs. Running out of money, he stayed with Gabrielle Enthoven and Cecile Sartoris, one of many lesbian couples who helped him, and with whom he felt absolutely at ease. He met the young Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne, at the beginning of their careers; he and they pooled their dreams of theatrical glory "over delicatessen potato salad and pickled dill".

Most importantly for Hay Fever, he met the great actress Laurette Taylor (later to create the role of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie) and was invited to stay with her, her husband Hartley Manners and their children. Their house parties were notorious for the family's eccentric behaviour, for the obscure and outlandish games to which the guests were subjected, and for the heady atmosphere of flirtation - much of which was imported wholesale into Hay Fever. It is extraordinary that so much of what we think of as quintessentially English and Cowardian in the play - the speed and precision, the outrageousness, the eccentricity - was largely based on an American model.

He wrote the play, somewhat depressed, after his second American visit, when many of his songs and sketches from London Calling had been included in Charlot's Revue of 1924; the show was a great triumph, but Coward was undergoing one of his periodic and intense depressions.

Contemplating a photograph of himself from the time, he wrote: "At 24 I seem shadowy. I know how I looked, of course ... my face was plumper and less lined than it is now, and my figure was good but a little weedy. Of what was going on inside me, however, there is no indication. There seems an emptiness somewhere, a blandness of expression in the eyes. There is little aggressiveness in the arranged smiles and no impatience apparent at all, and in this the cameras must have lied, for I have always been impatient. Nowadays there is more truth in my photographs. I hope there is more truth in me too."

Hay Fever, filled with the vividness of his American impressions, celebrating vitality of personality and underpinned by shrewd lessons which experience and helpful advice had taught him, is his first masterpiece, as true in its gossamer way as any of the great plays of the 20th century.